LOCAL POET’S CRITIQUE OF SAN DIEGO LACKS RHYME OR REASON

Try telling that to someone pursuing a career in science at your school, or someone who’s been turned away.

“I like San Diego,” Armantrout told me. “Maybe that didn’t come across enough.”

The blankness of this town? No, it didn’t.

Armantrout said the music scene here didn’t “blow up big,” but it actually spawned blink-182, Switchfoot, P.O.D., Jason Mraz and a host of other acts with national tours to their credit. Then she made fun of our street-spanning neighborhood signs, which I and others see as symbols of a colorful community canvas — not markers that there’s “no here here” and we’re trying to fix that.

When we discussed the signs, I understood her point but not her disdain: “Try to imagine you’re in New York, you’re in Greenwich Village, and there’s a big sign that says, ‘Greenwich Village.’ Is that ever going to happen? And then ask yourself why that won’t happen. You know what I mean. The more real it is, the less you need a sign.”

She said her piece was meant to be personal, funny, ambivalent, “a snapshot of my psyche as much as the city,” a suggestion that in sunny, spacious San Diego, “Things are almost about to happen all the time.”

She didn’t apologize, but she did acknowledge that aspiring teenage scientists might dream of being in San Diego. Surfers, too.

“Don’t make it sound like I hate San Diego, because I don’t hate San Diego,” she said. “It’s not like there’s all this venomous hatred that I was holding back. I know people who hate San Diego, but they’ve left.”

By way of explanation, she said charismatic people are irritating, too. She said her feelings about the city have evolved since childhood. She said they’re complicated, like her piece.

And she said they have been shored up by people’s reaction to it.

“This very sensitivity that apparently is showing up on Twitter is kind of a symptom of that inferiority complex,” she said. In Chicago, “people wouldn’t care.” In New York, “they’d go, ‘Look at you, you’re stupid.’ ”

San Diego does come up short in comparison to our nation’s actual finest cities. We’re not New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Never will be. Our city still offers plenty: outdoor activity, microbrews, art, science, border culture, fish tacos.

I think Armantrout’s piece missed the mark. She doesn’t.

“I’m happy with the piece,” she said. “I might regret publishing it. I might regret having done it at all, but I think if I was going to do it at all, that’s the way I had to do it.

“I don’t think my trying to turn into some kind of travel writer or some kind of booster for the city would have worked. It just wouldn’t have been an interesting piece of writing. Nobody would have been talking about it at all. And I really don’t think it was a put-down either. What I was going for is that it would have some complexity and some nuance.”

I understand complexity and nuance. I often aim for it myself. But this was an essay about a special place that didn’t seem so special.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I would have done better. And since I’m a columnist criticizing a poet for writing the column that she wrote, I will do better in a poem. Here’s a haiku for you, San Diego.